We Could Light The Candle
by CheerfulB
Summary: Just what I thought might be running through Gilbert's head during the Christmas tree scene. TV Gil is so different from book Gil, and it's interesting to imagine what he's thinking.
1. Chapter 1

Anne isn't pretty.

Gilbert knows that. She isn't pretty the way Ruby and Diana are, or Prissy Andrews. Her mouth is too big and too full of teeth, her eyes are too round and blue, and that hair...

Her hair was actually beautiful, he'd thought. Like fire, thick and waving around that expressive face. It was soft and heavy. He knew. He remembered from the single time he'd touched it, before she'd cracked the slate across his face. He'd touched it in his dreams (both awake and otherwise) a thousand times since.

He dreams of touching her in other ways too, but it feels wrong somehow. She's still so young. They really aren't far apart in age, but she's still a girl. This year, with his travels, he's somehow become a man.

Women overseas looked at him. When he came home, the odd Avonlea woman looked at him too. Some of the girls, even. They may not know what they want, but they like to look. The older ones know they want his hands on them. He's tempted, a little, but knows it would be wrong. Not because of what society or the minister say, but because his hands only want Anne, and she isn't ready. It wouldn't be right to use another that way.

He looks at her in the glow of the Christmas tree. Her poor shorn head. Everything not pretty about her is magnified even more now. Her mouth looks bigger, her teeth more plentiful, her freckles are EVERYWHERE, her ears stick out... his heart hurts because he knows hers does. He can feel how she feels when they laugh. He wants to pull her to him and whisper that it will grow back, and even if it didn't, he doesn't care because he...

What? Fancies her? Loves her? It's ridiculous but yes, he knows that he DOES love her, like some men love some women. The kind of woman you don't get over, the kind that are so oddly shaped that the hole they leave in a man's heart can't be filled.

When they bend over the same candle he can feel her breath on his face. She's so close and his entire body hardens, tightens, grows watchful. She looks shocked when she stares at him, and he knows she's feeling something of what he does even just for a second.

He knows he could kiss her, and in his head he almost does. He's ready to do it just this once, just a quick dry pressing of lips. He knows what men and women can really do together, knows about tongues and hands and all of it. What holds him back is that Anne knows, too.

He remembers what they said when she first came here, called her a trollop, said she was dirty. They don't realize that the precious innocence of their daughters is just ignorance. Anne's is real purity because she KNOWS how dark and grimy the attention of men can be, and chooses to be sweet and hopeful and romantic anyway.

So he balls his hands up and pulls back. Swallow, makes some strange sound he'll beat himself up over later. ( _The hell was that "hhmp", Blythe, you idiot_ ) He knows that he'll kiss her someday. He also knows he's going to have to marry her to touch her the way he wants to, and if he's being honest with himself he knows that it's what he wants more than anything.

Because Anne might not be pretty, might never be pretty, even though he can tell she's going to grow into her looks more than people imagine. But since the day he saw her in the woods, staring at Billy Andrews in terror and defiance, he's thought she was beautiful. And until the day he draws his last breath, he knows she's all he'll want to look at.


	2. I'll Be Your Shelter

The same moment by the Christmas tree, but this time from Anne's POV. And possible trigger warning for this for, I guess, vague thoughts of child abuse?

Notes: Well. Honestly, I don't know if this is any good at all, I've edited it so many times. What happened is that I chose the title for the fic randomly and it occurred to me that it was a lyric from the musical Rent. I'm trying to challenge myself to write under more difficult circumstances, so I decided to pick another Rent lyric and make the second chapter fit. It might have been very different if I hadn't! (I'm not even a Rent fanatic, these are just the places my mind goes) Anyway, the edits weren't fun but overall this was, so I hope you enjoy. :)

 **Chapter Text**

 _Anne will remember this moment months later, when Miss Stacy teaches them about electricity._

She knows what it is, of course, because of Aunt Josephine's house, but that just seems like magic. You touch a button on the wall and the fragile glass glows. Magic.

But here in the safety of Green Gables, with the smell of Christmas dinner floating in from the kitchen and the lilting voice of the fascinating new man, Sebastian, faint in the next room, and her face suddenly so close to Gilbert's...

This is magical too, and until she learns about raw power and currents and circuits, she won't know what to call the jolt she feels in the space between her startled gaze and Gilbert Blythe's brown eyes.

Before, she would have said she did. She's seen what men want. She's felt it in their glance occasionally, for all she is a poor and ugly orphan. And she knew from the speculative look in her eye when Mrs Hammond discussed "petting mice" that at some point, there would be another duty besides laundry and dishes and burping babies that she'd be happy to unload onto Anne.

So lust, desire, wanting...none of it is new to her. But something about this is. She lies thinking about it that night, unable to sleep, her new tiny dictionary tucked under her pillow.

It isn't the way Gil looked at her through the tiny thread of smoke from the candle they'd just blown out. She's seen that before, directed at her or not. Eagerness. Should-I-or-shouldn't-I. _But it's not the same, either,_ she reasons with herself, rolling over and tangling her legs in her long nightgown. There wasn't any meanness in the way Gilbert looked. Out of the corner of her eye she'd seen him clench his fists but it didn't occur to her to flinch, to be afraid. She didn't think that what he wanted would hurt her.

( _It would surprise most people who know her and her chatterbox ways, but Anne has many feelings that she cannot form into words. They're just images in her head that she desperately wants to speak but doesn't know how._ )

There was a house down the way from a place she'd lived as a small girl. It had belonged to an angry, bitter man who'd begat angry, bitter children and when he died they'd squabbled so over who would get the house that none of them ever did. They'd just fought amongst themselves about it until they were all too old to move into it, or dead.

The house had been empty many years by the time Anne first laid eyes on it. It was beginning to lean, and though it had once been white it was now gray from age and grime. All the windows had gone, one by one, from confused birds or boys with rocks. Wind and rain had pulled off a board here, a board there, til the place was riddled with gaps and crawling with mold. Anne usually felt a pitiful kinship with unloved, abandoned houses, but this one filled her with nothing but cold dread. No one who lived there had ever been happy. No one who lived there ever would be.

She assumed the house would fall to pieces entirely at some point, whether through nature or finally razed to the ground by one of the angry, bitter grandchildren of the original family. But even then, she imagined ( _and being who she was, she imagined plenty_ ) there would be something...not right...there forever after. It would be the kind of empty ground you walked over with a shudder though you didn't know why, the kind of place that made you look quickly behind you and hurry through it all the faster.

Later when she notices the way men sometimes look at her and other girls, even though she understands the mechanics of what they want, words for the feeling will elude her. Her mind goes blank except for one image, that of the house.

She gets the feeling that what those men want will leave her like that, sad and full of holes that can't be seen. And they know it, but they are the kind of men who like to throw rocks through windows, who like the fury of a storm ripping away at something until it collapses to nothing but a pile of boards in the rain.

Billy Andrews is like that. He is that kind of boy and if not severely pruned back, he will grow into that kind of man. She knew it that day when he caught her in the woods. Her heart hammered then like a cornered rabbit, because like them she had learned to sniff out the dangerous beings of the world.

For all her anger at Gilbert ( _and she has occasionally been very, very angry at him...her hand twitches against the quilt as if feeling the_ _reverberation of the slate that day_ ), she knows she will forever have a sense of gratitude for the way he came to her aid. Through luck and quick thinking she's managed to stay a step ahead of those who would harm her deeply, but there have also been kind people who have helped along the way. Gil is one.

 _Is that why, she wonders, is it that she feels she owes him? He wouldn't like that._ She blows out a frustrated sigh that would usually ruffle against a strand of hair along her cheek. She rubs her poor, too-light-feeling head and wills her hair to grow faster.

It's more. ( _She insists on being resolutely truthful with herself in matters such as this, at least here in the secret dark of midnight._ ) Kind people have been few and far between in her life, but there have been some. They didn't make her want to...want to...she doesn't _know_. She burrows her head down into her pillow and resolves to think no more about it.

This decision lasts all of three seconds. She does know. It's not that she wants...well, THAT. She didn't even want a kiss. She just wanted...it must have been some kind of madness that made her throat go dry, made her want to just touch him _once_. Specifically a fingertip along his jawbone, where it twitched when he pulled back from her. Or maybe to put her tired, ridiculous looking scarecrow head on his shoulder for just a minute, the way she does with Matthew and Marilla. ( _And not like that at all_ , her brain taunts.)

So it's all of those things, but it's also that her mind went blank again, when she saw the longing on his face. But this time she thought briefly of different kinds of houses, houses where people could be happy, and safe, where they could stay forever if they wanted to. Houses that were made of strong things like solid beams or bricks or maybe just the arms of someone who loved you.

The other men, the bad ones, wanted girls like the squabbling descendents wanted that old house. They hated it, but they wanted it to belong to them just the same. Gilbert looked at her like he wanted her for his, but also like he was pleading with her to own him right back.

 _And so that's it,_ she thinks, as she yawns and finally begins to blink and slip into sleep. She resolves to put it out of her mind, to never ponder this again. (And for quite awhile, she won't.) But she thinks it now for one clear, sun-bright second...for the first time, she knows it's possible ( _probable, certain_ , her mind whispers) that one day she will want him too. Because when she feels Gilbert Blythe's eyes on her, she doesn't feel dread, or worry, or desperate to run away like a terrified winter hare.

All she feels, is home.

Actions


End file.
